Mr Lee
The grief Mr Lee was carrying for his daughter could not be contained. If he opened his mouth too much, it would gush out. Ringing his wife was the hardest thing he had ever done. As he said “Soon-young is dead. Our daughter is dead,” his heart exploded. He felt the bomb go off in his mind and he was whacked. He buckled. He nearly dropped the phone. His wife was screaming with a high-pitched scream that broke all the crystal in the Kremlin; that imploded and shattered three thousand year old pottery across the length and breadth of Japan
In Korea , his wife’s scream froze the hairs on the back of the necks of the entire population of Seoul
Mr Lee was carrying that scream with him wherever he went. When he lay down to sleep in the bed in his hotel room, he closed his eyes and immediately the scream opened them again.
His body was racked with it. It played his nerves like a Chinese orchestra of disharmonious yee woos being played by the inmates at the lunatics’ ball.
Every day he went to Jem’s building and waited across the road in the student cafe on the corner. Once he was seated at a table, he pretended to read a newspaper or a book.
Today was his third day there. Each time he bought a coffee or a diet coke, he tipped the young waitress $5. That was cool and now she kept an eye out in case he wanted anything. She had sussed that he only wanted to sit at one particular table because once when he went up to the counter for a refill and somebody else sat down there, Mr Lee went and stood outside, leaving his coffee undrunk on the counter. After that, she told him just to wave her over and she would bring him what he needed. She wasn’t meant to serve the customers, they were meant to queue up at the counter but what the fuck, no one else was tipping her $5.
When the cafe closed, Mr Lee sat outside Jem’s building in a rental car. It wasn’t a busy street and no one seemed to take any notice of him. He didn’t know what he planned to do or why he was waiting. He knew he had to see Jem. Talk to him. Kill him. He didn’t know. All he knew was the scream and that his heart had been pulverised, pulped and shredded and that his daughter was dead and his life was meaningless. He had to find out why this had happened. There had to be a reason, otherwise what was the point? He waited and waited.
Mr Lee had paid a local Auckland-Korean to check Jem out. He told the guy Jem’s name and that he lived in the building where his daughter’s body had been found. The police had told Mr Lee that Jem had found his daughter’s body but he was not a suspect. He was a young New Zealand artist who had just returned from a successful exhibition of his work in a Paris Auckland
Mr Lee’s guy found the address for him and Mr Lee visited the Auckland Paris
At the cafe when he wasn’t pretending to read his newspaper, he took out Jem’s slides and held them up to the sunlight. He could tell they were good. Even though he hated Jem, he thought they were beautiful. He knew Jem was young and he had expected bold cartoon characters in bright colours with black lines around them doing lots of dirty things to each other and to Bambi and Jackie Kennedy and so on. These were nothing like that.
These were works of art made by a man who was born with an angel on his shoulder and music in his veins. Not the breath of the devil on his lips. Could a man like that kill his daughter? He gazed into the deep blue panoramas, the swelling curves of the rocks and the wind disturbing the seagulls’ wings and he tried to gauge if that man could kill. Every now and then he took out the photo of Jem and gazed at it.
He read all the back issues of the daily newspaper and cut out and kept the articles about his dead daughter. About five that morning when he was stiff and delusional he drove round the block, back to his hotel and asked the concierge to blow up the picture of Jem. Yawning, the concierge took the article. He was about to go off duty in an hour and was pretty fucked. He didn’t make a judgement call as to what an odd request it was. Besides it was a quiet time of his shift and he might as well stretch his legs before they went to sleep on him.
Mr Lee took the large photocopy of Jem and placed it inside his case in his hotel room. On the top. Before he returned to the cafe he went to the hotel’s twenty- four hour restaurant and quickly ate a large bowl of laksa. It had looked good but as he chewed and swallowed, it did not taste of fresh, flesh-pink salmon, succulent, tasty Bluff oysters seeped in creamy coconut milk. It tasted of boiled string, wads of wet newspapers, lifeless left-over damp kitchen cloths.
He paid his bill and walked back to the little cafe. It was seven a.m. Only two hours since he had left the quiet back street. The rental car was now parked in the hotel car park.
He would have preferred to have checked into a small family hotel but there did not seem to be any in the centre of Auckland
Staying in a large hotel probably guaranteed him some anonymity. He wasn’t sure yet if he needed to be anonymous. He wasn’t sure if he would kill Jem. He knew he would never be sure of anything again. Inside him a tiny dot was all that remained of the original man.
He needed the little personal services that the young waitress was providing if he were to keep sane.
He knew that she now put her trays of clean forks and knives and containers of paper napkins on his table. Saving a place for him. Saving his table by the window, covering the surface, so no one would sit there even when the café filled up, because it looked like a work space. Then when Mr Lee arrived she quickly cleared it all away leaving the table empty for him.
Mr Lee was on his third cup of coffee for the day when he saw Jem leave his building. He recognised him immediately from the photo. His reflexes went onto red alert, his breathing quickened but his exterior demeanour did not change. He left a $5 note on the table by the window and walked off down the street after Jem.
The evening before, he had bought some typical Kiwi clothes to replace the American-inspired checks and pastels he was wearing when he arrived. Now he was dressed in jeans and a dark green T-shirt and a pair of Dirty Dog shades. Only his expensive immaculate Reeboks gave him away as not being a real Kiwi. Mr Lee hoped that he blended. He did.
But what he wanted to wear, what Mr Lee really wanted to wear was a long black robe, covering him from head to toe. He wanted to cover his head with it, cover his face with it, lie down on the earth in it and sink slowly down into the soil. Deep down and disappear.
© Joselyn Morton.
(‘Mr Lee’ is an extract from Joselyn Morton’s novel ‘The Transparent Trampoline’)
